


Sweven

by Who Shot AR (akerwis)



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Genre: Corpses, Dreams and Nightmares, M/M, Retrospective, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-02 23:12:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2829473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akerwis/pseuds/Who%20Shot%20AR
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Gideon rarely dreams of Thrax now.</i>  </p><p>Set between <i>The Virtu</i> and <i>The Mirador</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sweven

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hecateis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hecateis/gifts).



> sweven, _n._ /ˈswɛv(ə)n/ A dream, vision.

Gideon rarely dreams of Thrax now.

When he was a boy, it was the setting of most of his dreams. For so many years, it was all he knew; even in dreams of distant Troians, inland Kekropia, or worlds beyond all he knew, cold seas and weathered stone quays figured prominently. There were the unimaginably heavy crates that traveled up and down the coast, waiting patiently to be pushed onto a battered ship like a stubborn horse. And the dockers, all but chained to the stones that harbored ships only briefly before letting them go. There were always dockers and the scent of fish and seaweed, and the overpowering sense that, unless Gideon found passage on a ship bound far away, this would be his life until he died.

He was wrong, as children so often are. The gods of his childhood hearth gave him over to magic, and when he could stomach no more of it, the White Lady gave him the death that had haunted his nightmares since he first gawked up at the Bastion’s heavy walls. His dreams shifted with his location.

Thrax no longer seems like a real place, filled with annemer people living annemer lives; when he sees it in his mind, waking or sleeping, it looks like a backdrop for a play, flattened and washed out into watery shades of grey. Shapeless boxes, faceless people, and the occasional crash of waves—but he has been so long from the sea that the sound might now resemble a thunderclap.

There are ways of mastering dreams, he discovers, an entire discipline devoted to their use in magic. Oneiromancy: something he learns from the Eusebian masters of his youth, something from which he tries not to recoil when he learns to manipulate the stuff of others’ minds to his own ends. It is not a cruel discipline, for all the cruelty held within some of its practices, and eventually, he masters its use against his nightmares.

But the architecture of his thaumaturgy is that of the Bastion; it is built upon the pain of others and the negotiations of power that frame every interaction, from seeing someone in a corridor to finding oneself in his bed. _Which of us is stronger? Is it you or I who will leave this moment unharmed?_ There is always a single answer in Mercator’s Bastion, and unless one is willing to seek ruthlessly the weakness on others, one will always come to harm.

For years, he dreams of quiet, of stones falling down wells and landing in cool water far from the sun’s reach—but below them, the Titan Clock’s tick continues. Of books, shelved in rooms that never seemed to end, with windows that allow sunlight to illuminate motes of dust as well as the words upon the page. He dreams of deaths, his own (theoretical) and others’ (factual), and of Louis’ hard-angled face a finger’s-width from his. The cobwebs and dark corners of the Bastion; the mingling scents of blood and mildew; the distant screams to which he shuts his ears for over twenty years, letting his own sense of self-preservation, held within whatever task might be set before him at that moment, drown them. He tries not to dream of those occasions when he was at the epicenter of someone else’s pain, both wellspring of and witness to its creation…but powerful though oneiromancy can be, dreams are more powerful yet. Some will always escape the bounds of the discipline’s structure.

Now, within the Mirador, his dreams are a strange mélange of everything that has come before. Gideon no longer dreams of lands he has never seen; those are places he will never visit, and he has trained his dreaming mind to leave their portrayal to poets and playwrights. Often, his dreams are queerly literal reenactments of his choices, visits and revisits through a hall of memory to the Empyrean or a game of Long Tiffany with Mildmay. But sometimes they are not.

_I am standing on the deck of a coaster—a small ship that runs up and down the ports of Kekropia, delivering goods to the merchants who need them—with my arms resting on the rail. My stomach swerves uncomfortably within me, the contents of my dinner threatening to spatter the waves below. For all that I was raised among ships, I did not sail._

_Felix is not here. I know that he should be, that we were going to cross the sea together in this slender-hulled craft. I do not know where we are going. Troia? Perhaps we could go to Troia. I can’t begin to imagine the books their libraries contain, all those that have never found their way to audiences beyond their shores, but I wouldn’t be opposed to trying. Awake, I could speak on the subject; asleep, the world shrinks to the scent of saltwater and the empty space around me._

_When I cross aft, the shore is visible, and on it, a bright flash of red hair. Felix stands among the ships in Thrax’s harbor and watches me, a blood-spattered orchid pinned to his lapel. He lazily raises a hand in greeting, and though I know he is too far away to hear my shout, I try. The squawk that escapes my throat is rough and purposeless, an embarrassment to a man who apparently can’t remember his tongue met an unpleasant end long before tonight._

_The swells of water shift to rolling waves of grass, the ship moving smoothly over the Grasslands. I do not need to see a night-dark silhouette on the horizon to understand, though it stands there in the distance anyway, waiting. We are sailing to the Bastion; there is no way to set foot in Kekropia and resist its pull._

_Something touches me. First the gentlest brush of fingertips at my shirt, and then a long-fingered hand grasping and pulling tight around the bony curve of my shoulder. I half expect the hand to leave bloodstains when it lets me go. If it lets me go._

_I turn my head. The corpse at my side has no eyes, and yet I recognize it. Once, long before it bloated with putrid-smelling decay, it was a man. It taught me magic._

_What happens next does not deserve the dignity of remembrance._

He wakes shaking, his mouth wide, as though to scream—but the only sound is the noisy rasp of his breath. As soon as he has wit enough to manage it, Gideon clamps his jaws shut and flicks a hand toward the ceiling.

The glow of his witchlights wakes Felix, or begins to; he yawns, shifting next to Gideon, and cracks an eye open. “Gideon, what’re you…Gideon?”

Gideon shakes his head, realizing that he’s still curled up in a heap, as though he’d been returned to the cell in Aiaia before waking. With conscious effort, he stretches his legs out.   _:It’s nothing. A dream.:_

“Gideon,” he says again, propping himself up with one elbow. The ethereal light casts his pale skin in a hazy blue tone, redolent of death by suffocation; Gideon cuts the witchlights, leaving them in blinding darkness.

Felix’s arm snakes around his waist, pulling him nearer. He sags against Felix’s bare chest, drawing a long breath filled with the warm scent of his bare skin, and reminds himself of what he’s already said. It’s nothing. A dream.

 _:Whatever it is,:_ he begins to tell Gideon, then falls silent.

Gideon sighs without breath—a concept from which a more dedicated philosopher than he could derive an entire book. Felix is not a man naturally given to comforting others, and well-meant though his attempt seems, the words fall short. He doesn’t try to finish his sentence, though Gideon gives him time (and resists the desire to raise an eyebrow in the darkness, a silent punctuation Felix will not see and does not deserve anyway).

What does not disappoint is the gentle press of his hand at the small of Gideon’s back, nor the warmth of his chest and arms. In the moments that follow, the tremor Gideon feels within his upper arms and thighs eases away. Felix’s unbound curls slide over Gideon’s bare shoulder, a sensation so soft it can almost expunge his memory of the touch of death.

 _:Sleep,:_ Gideon tells him, and Felix answers with a kiss to his mouth.

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> I'm betting this isn't as anonymous as it could be, but nevertheless: happy first Yuletide, and may the coming year be filled with good times for you and yours. ♥ Thank you for putting such good prompts in your letter.


End file.
